Thursday, July 23, 2015

I think Ronald Colman's not as famous as Errol Flynn because his name's boring. Names are important in popular history—I suspect the Gunfight at the OK Corral would not be as famous if it had been Bob Schmidt, his brothers Tom and Jack, and a doctor named Peabody fighting the Smith Gang near O'Neal's Stable. But maybe it's just that fame is fickle, so Colman's not as well remembered as his swashbuckling peers, for all that he was every bit as good as them.

If I Were King is limited by the technology of 1938, so you don't watch it for spectacle. You watch it for charm. All the acting is a little broad, but the story's broad, so that doesn't offend. The surprising performance comes from Basil Rathbone, who I might not have recognized if I hadn't been expecting him to appear. Preston Sturges did the script, which has some nice lines and a populist subtext—the word "bourgeois" appears once, as part of an insult. The plot is simple—a king, Rathbone, decides to reward and punish a man, Colman, who both helped and opposed him—and our hero soon learns that the punishment will be greater than he had thought, if he doesn't find a way out.

The movie doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere. I got a DVD from the library. (It is on Youtube, but the sound is a couple of seconds off, which is unbearable.)

Recommended for fans of '30s historical adventure. Will-Bob gives it a B+ for charm, though it prob'ly deserves a B.

Nearly 70% of Facebook employees are men and 57% are white. Asians make up 34% of employees.But Hispanics represent just 4% and African Americans are just 2% of Facebook's workforce.When it comes to technical employees, the numbers are even more grim. Eighty-five percent are male, 53% white and 41% Asian. Hispanics make up just 3% and African Americans just 1% of the workforce.At the top of the company, the statistics are no better. Seventy-seven percent of senior level employees are men, 74% are white and 19% are Asian. Hispanics account for 4% and African Americans for 2% of employees in high level positions.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Note: As a script doctor, my fixes are purely about the script. So while I would've cast a black or Hispanic guy as Ant-Man, that's not part of the job here.

Minor fixes:

1. Cut the Russian and the black comic-relief sidekicks.

2. Give the Hispanic sidekick some serious, competent moments so he deserves to be the hero's buddy.

3. Make both the hero and the sidekick want to go straight after prison, so the hero has to convince the sidekick to help pull the heist.

Major fix:

4. In the third act, when the bad guy is getting away with the Yellowjacket suit, Hope van Dyne should start to go after them, and her father realizes it's time to do the right thing: he reveals the Wasp costume, and together, Ant-man and the Wasp defeat Yellowjacket.

ETA: Regarding #4, this wouldn't just let us have some female superhero buttkicking, it would do two emotional things: it would establish that Hank Pym no longer thinks Scott Lang is expendable, and it would show that he realizes he has to let people he loves make their own decisions about danger.

ETA 2: Regarding #3, this would do two things:

1. There's currently the implication that only middle-class white men want to go straight after prison.

2. Our hero's story arc would be greater if he was more willing to take shortcuts at the beginning of the movie—it's the same reason why Han Solo should shoot first.

This is a fun movie, but it is not a smart movie. It went through two directors and four writers and who knows how many other hands, and the result is a pleasant, visually enjoyable, and surprisingly naive movie. Its racial casting is straight out of the 1970s, and so is its handling of gender.

Near-spoiler: there's a scene with the Falcon that's fun. That and some in-jokes pleased the fanboy in me.

Verdict: I did not regret going, but I would've waited for it to hit a second-run house if I'd known what I was going to get. This is a trailer movie: if you like the trailer, you won't be disappointed with what you get if you don't expect more. Will-Bob gives it a B, and that's only because he's a fanboy. It probably deserves a B-.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

I just read Jane Yolen's answer to how she came to write Briar Rose and realized someone should do an article on books that began with a notion by Terri Windling. War for the Oaks is among them. So is the Liavek series—Terri knew of our group of writers and thought we could have fun doing a shared-world anthology like Thieves' World with more of a high fantasy take.

ETA: To be clear, War for the Oaks didn't begin as an idea by Terri. Emma was working on Falcon when she mentioned her notion for War for the Oaks to Terri. Terri told Emma that if she put Falcon aside and started War for the Oaks immediately, Terri would give her a contract. Being a wise beginning writer, Emma did just that.

Friday, July 10, 2015

I'm proof-reading Liavek stories in order to start releasing ebooks in the next week or two. Because the anthologies came out in the '80s, before publishers believed personal computers were here to stay, we don't have electronic files of the edited stories. So we sent paperbacks off to a cheap OCR service. The scans are pretty good, but things sneak by. Catching the typo I'm about to share means I'm not a completely inept proofreader, because my word processor's spell-checker merely said, yep, that's a word, and didn't flag it with squiggly lines.

The OCR has trouble with "rm" and "rn—it often interprets "burn" as "bum" and "turn" as "tum". But I could never have guessed what it would do to this sentence:

Birth magic tingled along her arms...

The OCR's version:

Birth magic tingled along her anus...

For a moment, I was tempted not to change it. It's not as impressive as the Wicked Bible's "Thou shalt commit adultery," but as typos go, it's decent—at least, if your sense of humor is as juvenile as mine. But while they say all publicity is good publicity, the story and its author deserve better, so I fixed it.

Hmm. On the one hand, I hate "hate crime" laws: arrest people for their deeds. But if you're suggesting "hate crimes" disproportionately affect black folks, there's this from the FBI in 2014: "Of the reported 3,407 single-bias hate crime offenses that were racially motivated, 66.4 were motivated by anti-black or African-American bias, and 21.4 percent stemmed from anti-white bias." Hate crimes tend to be committed by poor folks, and there are twice as many white people as black in poverty in the US, so it suggests the hate crime laws are being administered more on the basis of class than race. Though I'd also like to know what percentage of hate crimes are urban, since black poverty is more urban than white and Hispanic poverty. And I realize correlation is not necessarily causation, so there may be other factors at work, of course.

That 2-to-1 ratio is not the perfect tool for seeing what may be more about class than race, of course, but it's often useful for understanding the racial imbalance of many things in the US, including imprisonment and death row. I probably got the hint from Martin Luther King's declaration,

There are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

Monday, July 6, 2015

On Facebook, someone insisted black people can't be racist. I commented,

Malcolm X thought black people could be racist, so I'm going to stick with his opinion. For example, he said, "I totally reject Elijah Muhammad's racist philosophy, which he has labeled 'Islam' only to fool and misuse gullible people as he fooled and misused me. But I blame only myself, and no one else for the fool that I was, and the harm that my evangelical foolishness on his behalf has done to others." He knew more about racism than any privileged theorist who teaches at the private schools for the ruling class.

A common response by anti-racism theorists is they're talking about "institutional" racism. If so, they should say only white people can be institutional racists, but they don't, perhaps because they subconsciously realize that as soon as they say that, they would have to acknowledge that just as black slaveowners benefitted from slavery in the Old South, the black bourgeoisie benefits from "institutional racism" today.Worse for them, they would have to ask what the institution of "institutional racism" is, which they really don't want to do, because it's capitalism, the hierarchical system that let most of the believers in insitutional racism attend expensive private schools where they were taught how to understand privilege in a way that did not challenge their own place in this country's economic hierarchy.My current definition of "institutional racism" is that it's(1) an explanation of how capitalism affects working class black people that avoids mentioning class, and(2) an explanation of any capitalist institution that's managed by racists.Consider this a footnote to Racism equals prejudice plus power, so only white people can be racist?ETA: A relevant data point for anyone who talks about race and power in the US. InWhat Matters, Walter Benn Michaels notes:

In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. White people, for example, make up about 70 per cent of the US population, and 62 per cent of those in the bottom quintile. Progress in fighting racism hasn’t done them any good; it hasn’t even been designed to do them any good. More generally, even if we succeeded completely in eliminating the effects of racism and sexism, we would not thereby have made any progress towards economic equality. A society in which white people were proportionately represented in the bottom quintile (and black people proportionately represented in the top quintile) would not be more equal; it would be exactly as unequal. It would not be more just; it would be proportionately unjust.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

The Biblical Jesus offers two incompatible takes on allies and opponents:

"whoever is not against us is for us" —Mark 9:40

"whoever is not with me is against me" —Matthew 12:30

Because the rationalizing animal can rationalize anything, many Christians rationalize this, but if you think the Bible is accurate, the only sensible explanation is Jesus couldn't make up his mind. No matter what your take, Luke 9:50 has him saying, "whoever is not against you is for you", so if he vacillated, he favored the idea that only those who oppose you are your opponents.

Most students of the mind would agree the outlooks in Mark and Luke are healthy ways to think of others, and the version in Matthew is paranoid—which is the version cults love. Matthew's take may be an accurate reflection of the writer and perhaps of his immediate community, while Mark and Luke were less afraid of the people around them, so I'm happy to think they all wrote what they believed Jesus said.

But I'll go with Mark and Luke.

ETA: Brother Will is a bad scholar: Luke has two versions of the saying. The second is at Luke 11:23: "Whoever is not with me is against me."

Friday, July 3, 2015

Something two or three of you might find funny. Or infuriating. And the rest will go "Huh?", which may be best, but I'll give a short preface to try to explain this anyway:

US socialists can currently be divided into two camps, those who support Bernie Sanders and those who fear he's a "sheepdog" whose job is to get socialists to vote for Ms. Clinton after Sanders loses the nomination. I am in the first group. I have never seen any evidence to support the sheepdog theory, and I'm suspicious of it because I'll vote for another socialist if, as is most likely, the Dems push Sanders out.

Just now, I came across this comment on a Facebook post which I am passing along to both of the people who might appreciate it:

Julien Noah Devereux said, "Can't let Bernie sheepdog America's several dozen socialists into the Democratic Party when they would otherwise be starting the revolution. That's just common sense."

Thursday, July 2, 2015

In 1962, while Malcolm X was still part of the Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, Air France Flight 007 crashed carrying 122 white art patrons from Athens, Georgia and ten crew members. All of the passengers and eight crew members were killed. Ann Uhry Abrams wrote that “the impact on the city in 1962 was comparable to New York of September 11." Out of respect for the mourners, Martin Luther King canceled a sit-in that had been planned to protest segregation.But Malcolm X said, "I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has happened...I got a wire from God today...well, all right, somebody came and told me that he really had answered our prayers over in France. He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But thanks to God, or Jehovah, or Allah, we will continue to pray, and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky."

This year, Bahar Mustafa, the diversity officer for Goldsmiths University, London, created an uproar for tweets with the label #killallwhitemen and called people "white trash", a term that manages to be simultaneously racist and classist because it means a white person is, to use the language of the Old South, "lower than a nigger". But since Ms. Mustafa is British, she may not have known the term's history. She may have only thought it referred to white people who disagreed with her.Lest her name make you think she is not privileged, she graduated in gender and media studies from the expensive school where she works, and she lives with her parents in a "£450,000 three-bedroom terrace". For Americans, that's a $700,000 condo.

In 1964, Malcolm X came back from Mecca with a new understanding of the world. He said, "I totally reject Elijah Muhammad's racist philosophy," and declared, "I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think that it will be based upon the color of the skin."